Sean O’Grady, US Media Manager, Universum USA (Philadelphia)

A well presented employment brand is an effective tool to attract and even retain the right people, but as with all things recruiting it has to be real; the brand, the message, the images. Your potential candidate is smart and will use his or her social media network and tools to insure your message undeniably represents the real brand.

So, with this in mind how do you use video to convey the em­ployer branding message in the best possible manner?

Here are two commonly asked questions we have tried to answer:

Q: We’re making our first employer branding video this year. What best practices should we have in mind?

A: Focus on characters, think visually and emphasize one clear message per video.

The success of any employer branding video hinges on the audiences’ ability to connect with the video’s subjects – your employees. Therefore, great attention should be paid to who is chosen for your video. We recommend you conduct a pre-screening either in person or over the phone, to test how well the potential video subject embodies your organization’s culture and how his or her personality will look and feel on camera. The more engaging, positive and well spoken the subject, the better your video will be. As a helpful hint – try to leverage your organization’s PR- or media relations team to vet candidates.

Visual thinking also pays enormous dividends. Remember, seeing is believing! If your interview subject volunteers his time with children – it should be caught on film. If your interview subject visits clients as part of her job – it should be caught on film. When preparing for a video, think about all aspects of your subject’s job and personality and how a film crew can tag along to capture it.

Finally, don’t cram too much information into a video. The average recommended online video view time is about 1.5 minutes. That means you have 90 seconds to connect with the au­dience. It’s better to pick one message and use the full 90 seconds to clearly communicate that to the audience then to try to mash too much information into too little a space.

Q: We picked the perfect person for our employer branding video and the results have been phenomenal. The only trouble is, the person left our company shortly after we finished the video. Do we need to edit this person out or re-shoot?

A: Only if you want to spend money. This is a very common issue with employer brand­ing videos. If the individual left the company due to an inauspicious circumstance then yes – your HR and branding teams should consider if that individual is the right person to represent your firm. However, if this person was an ideal employee during his or her tenure then you should increase your video’s shelf life and the project’s return on investment by sticking with it. Remember – branding videos are about story telling. Is there value to the story this employee told? Does this video accurately and positively describe the work environment and culture of your organization? If the answers are yes, then there is no need to scrap the video.

Related posts:

1. Sean O’Grady – Bio
2. Attract, Retain, Repel: How Employment Branding and Organizational Culture Can Increase the ROI of Recruitment and Retention
3. Enduring Brands – Flying High Despite the Recession

Sean O’Grady, US Media Manager, Universum USA (Philadelphia)

Sean O’Grady is the Universum’s US Media Manager and a co-founder of CareerTV.com. O’Grady and his team have produced over 1000 employer branding and career profile videos for organizations across the globe.

Related posts:

1. Employer Branding Surgery
2. Enduring Brands – Flying High Despite the Recession
3. Michelle Boyde – Bio

New data suggest that the economy’s long-term slide may finally be showing signs of coming to a halt. Specifically, the pace of layoffs tapered considerably in September. 

The latest report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. on downsizing activity reveals that planned job cuts announced by employers last month fell to 34,768, the lowest monthly total in over a decade and a 17 percent decrease from the 41,676 cuts announced in July. August’s number, in fact, broke a three-month-long spate of increases in layoffs.

Compared in all sorts of ways to previous benchmarks, last month looks very good. August now replaces April as the lowest job-cut month of 2010 and is the lowest job-cut month since June of 2000 (when employers announced only 17,241 planned layoffs). Year-over-year, 2010, as well, is looking far better than 2009. Job cuts last month were 55 percent lower than they were in August of 2009, when 76,456 planned cuts were announced, and so far this year, monthly totals are, on average, 62 percent lower than the year-ago figure. Overall, the 374,121 job cuts through August are down 65 percent from the 1,070,504 layoffs announced by this point in 2009.

Even for last month’s largest job-cutter, the pace has slowed considerably year-over-year: In August, the industrial goods sector announced 6,236 planned layoffs. That was not only last month’s largest number, but also the sector’s largest monthly job-cut total for the year. Even so, the year-to-date total in this sector, 16,962, is lower than the 17,528 job cuts employers in industrial goods announced last December alone, and by this point in 2009, industrial goods companies had announced 101,591 job cuts.

Related posts:

1. A 26-Year Peak for U.S. Unemployment

Part 1 of 3: An Interview with Yves Lermusi, CEO, Checkster
Reprinted with the permission from APQC

Yves Lermusi, CEO, Checkster

Quality of hire is a topic of keen interest to recruiters and talent acquisition professionals and in June of 2010, APQC interviewed Yves Lermusi, CEO of Checkster, to ask him how he, and some of the organizations he works with, define and measure quality of hire. These days Yves spends most of his time consulting and analyzing the cost and effect of quality of hire.

This will be a three part series on the effect and challenges of measuring Quality of Hire.

Part I

APQC: First, let’s begin with a definition of quality of hire. Measuring quality of hire is something that many of our member organizations struggle with. How do you define quality of hire?

YL: There are two distinctions that are important to note when you think about the hiring process: One is the efficiency of the process. The other is the effectiveness of the process. Efficiency involves how fast you can do the process, and how inexpensively you can do the process. Effectiveness relates to how good the outcome is, and is essentially the quality of hire. This is the distinction from a high-level point of view.

Often, the focus of talent acquisition experts and vice presidents of talent acquisition has been mainly on efficiencies, and not enough on effectiveness or quality. So, to come back to the definition of quality of hire, it is ultimately defined as the output of the new hires coming onboard. Obviously, this is a general definition.

A basic CFO-level metric for quality of workforce is revenue per employee but from a corporate standpoint it is a short-sighted measurement. The more comprehensive measurement is revenue divided by total labor spend (the overall spending on labor, taking into account not only your full-time equivalents but also the contingent labor spend). That is one way to see how good or efficient your workforce is.

From the standpoint of recruiters and the talent acquisition department, there are different ways to measure quality of hire. From their perspective, at a high level, you evaluate the output created by each new hire according to different measurements.

APQC: A follow-up question to this idea of the ratio of total organizational revenue divided by the spending on labor is: Would people consider that measure a form of human capital return on investment overall?

YL: That’s correct. Our approach has been that so many people are speaking about the overall revenue per employee. There is recent research that has shown that this definition is not accurate. It ignores the contingent labor force. It is a good step in the right direction, but not quite there. To give you one specific example, we conducted an analysis and one organization had revenue per employee at $145,000. Another organization had about $150,000 in revenue per employee. In this example, it would appear that organization number two is more efficient than the first organization, so organization number two must have better people, better processes, etc. Then, we looked at the ratio of revenue on total labor spend for the two organizations, and it brought us to the opposite conclusion.

In a “return on workforce” approach, organizations look not at revenue, but at operating income [essentially profits], divided by total labor cost. This provides a “micro-measurement” that is directly impacted by not only organizational strategy, and the quality of organizational processes, but also by the company’s people.

APQC: Let’s move from talking about strategic measurements to talking about the operational measurements for quality of hire. Many of our members and customers participate in APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking survey on “Recruiting, Sourcing and Selecting Employees,” and it includes many measures at the tactical level in terms of efficiency, productivity, and cost of the process for the organization. But when it comes to measuring quality, that’s something that I think organizations still tend to struggle with.

YL: Let me first say that a third of the organizations we work with today don’t do anything about quality of hire-they don’t measure anything.

For those that do, let me give you a couple of specific, tactical, examples for measuring quality of hire– not at the corporate level, but rather at the recruiter or departmental level. Quality of hire is the most strategic measurement of talent acquisition. The example I often give is to just imagine that you have to start a restaurant and you need to hire a chef. If you want to be extremely efficient, you go out in the street and hire the first guy that’s looking for a job, because he can probably cook a couple of dishes. It costs you five minutes to find the person and fill the job–very quick, very inexpensive. But, what’s the likelihood that the individual will be up to par in terms of helping you compete in the restaurant business? It is probably very slim.

However, when you look at talent acquisition departments, most of their operational metrics have been time to fill and cost per hire. How quickly can you do it, and how inexpensively can you do it? However, good companies would rather hire new employees that are a good fit and stay for the long-term, rather than someone who has to be fired six months after being hired. So, quality of hire is a strategic measure.

Once we agree that quality of hire is a strategic measure for recruiting and talent acquisition departments—how do we go about measuring it? For many of our customers, what they do is if they have some jobs that are easy to measure-typically sales jobs and call center types of jobs-then they use those standard measurements of performance for those jobs as benchmarks for quality of hire. For example, call centers monitor call resolution and the speed of success. They also conduct post-call surveys. For sales jobs, typically you see the volume of sales, customer satisfaction, and customer retention as standard measures of performance. The other way that we’ve seen organizations measuring quality of hire is through proxy measurements, such as new-hire retention.

APQC: When you talk about retention to gauge quality of hire as a proxy, are organizations looking at different points like retention at 30 days, 90 days, six months, a year, or more than five years?

YL: That depends from one organization to another and depends of the jobs. But more fundamentally, new hire retention is only an approximation of quality of hire because a new hire may join an organization and six months down the road his or her spouse is relocated and they have to follow. In that case, the employee’s leaving the organization has nothing to do with quality. There are a number of similar types of examples, so new hire retention is a proxy for quality of hire. It is one measurement that organizations are using today because it’s a measurement that they have at their fingertips.

Another way that they measure quality of hire is to look at the performance reviews after the first year to see how those people are doing. But a big debate comes into play: Is the performance of an individual the responsibility of the direct manager? Or, is it the responsibility of the recruiter? There is no straight answer.

It will obviously depend as well on the type of job. In a job with high turnover like retail, typically people don’t even last a year. The performance review after a year is not as useful. At some organizations where turnover is in the single-digit percentage, they would say maybe it’s the first year or first two years that recruiting is responsible or has a huge impact. So, the performance review is not a straight answer either, because the quality of hire is not directly linked to what the recruiters have been doing in the long term (after a year).

What we see as the third most-used metric by organizations is a simple survey of the manager.

To be continued.

Part II to be published by Recruiting Trends on Thursday, September 9^th, 2010

About CHEKSTER

Checkster (www.checkster.com) offers reference-checking and 360-feedback technologies to client companies to help them automate reference checking, build a passive candidate database, and increase and measure their quality of hire.

ABOUT APQC

For over 30 years, APQC has been on the leading edge of improving performance and fostering innovation around the world. APQC works with organizations across all industries to find practical, cost-effective solutions to drive productivity and quality improvement. We are a member-based nonprofit currently serving more than 500 organizations in all sectors of business, education, and government.

123 North Post Oak Lane, Fl 3, Houston, TX 77024-7797
phone: +1-713-681-4020 or 800-776-9676
fax: +1-713-681-8578
e-mail: apqcinfo@apqc.org  www.apqc.org

Related posts:

1. HR’s Missing Link
2. Face It Recruiters…Interviews Suck
3. Youth and Unemployment

Jill Gengler, Vice President of Business Development, AccuSearch, Inc.

Sourcing talent these days is a monumental task.  According to the U.S. Labor Department’s latest monthly job openings and turnover survey, for every open position there are 5 potential applicants – a small improvement from the previous month’s survey.  However; surely this number doesn’t include the pool of currently employed (and underemployed) adults who are so stressed by the possible loss of their job due to economic conditions they can’t imagine tempting fate by applying for an open and potentially better position, with a new employer. 

In spite of accounting for fourteen million out of work Americans, the U.S. Labor Department’s survey seems markedly positive… only an average of 5 applicants per opening?  I have heard stories of enormous numbers of resumes and online applications received by recruiters in my network for each and every open position – literally hundreds of applicants for a single office administration, customer service and manual labor opening. 

Whether you are seeing 5 applicants or hundreds, the challenge of divining the most qualified applicant remains daunting. And, of course, once you find the employee whose skills and experience match your needs, most positions will require at least some level of formal, selective screening. If you are not already doing so, your organization could benefit significantly by considering a combined screening solution set to assist you finding the sharpest needle in the haystack of needles…  By a combined screening solutions set, I mean the consistent use of a number of screening components and tools.

A combined screening solution set may contain the following components – not necessarily in this order. The earlier red flags are identified in the process, the better the organization will be able to minimize the expenses and resource costs associated with the other elements of the recruiting cycle:

1)      Applicant Resume/Application Review

2)      Social Media Searches (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

3)      Integrity/Personality Testing

4)      Skills Testing

5)      One-on-one Interview(s)

6)      Background Screens

-          I-9 e-Verify
-          Criminal History
-          Driver History
-          Education Verification
-          Employment Verifications
-          Reference Checks
-          Credit Report
-          Drug Screening 

Items (1) and (2) are standard recruiting practices, but keep in mind that social media like LinkedIn and Facebook should be considered less than authoritative sources of information. 

In regard to (3) Integrity/Personality Testing, it is certain that organizations that use a combination of integrity/personality testing tools and (4) Skills Testing can identify those applicants who may lack impulse control, abuse substances, have excessive absenteeism, have a tendency toward hostile acts, as well as those who may not have the skill levels necessary to successfully perform the job’s tasks. 

While background screens will identify adverse information on an individual—felonies or misdemeanors, for example—a typical background screen report will not include adverse behaviors for which the individual has never been caught or convicted.  This is where integrity/personality tests provide their true value. In addition, many integrity/personality tests include customer service and work-place attitude modules which can provide a very reliable forecast of the applicant’s ability to perform interpersonal work in a professional manner. 

Component (5), one-on-one Interview(s) with those whose application, Integrity/Personality Test and Skills Test(s) raise no red flags, should narrow the applicant pool to a point at which investing in the final,  and often most costly and time intensive tool, (6)Background Screens, is cost-effective and prudent. 

A thorough pre-employment background screening search package should include reviews of criminal and sex offender reports on the applicant, along with other searches and verifications appropriate to the position being filled, such as Employment Verifications, Education Verifications, Driver Report and/or a Nationwide Search for Wants and Warrants and I-9 e-Verify (after the offer has been made.) Lastly, your organization may implement a drug screening program which can include traditional urinalysis and or instant drug testing—administered fairly, consistently and in compliance with federal and your specific state laws. 

Obviously securing a partner or partners who can facilitate the Integrity/Personality Testing, Skills Testing and Background Screening Services components of your combined screening solution set may also present a challenge.  However, many of the members of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (www.NAPBS.org) offer each of these components.  The Society of Human Resources Management (www.SHRM.org) hosts the “HR Talk” community and the ERE.net communities  (public forums) where members share HR-related information and experience with other members – both are excellent resources for obtaining frank feedback and recommendations for service providers.   You also have the Advisory Members and Thought Leadership Authors of RecruitingTrends to assist you by recommending potential partners or even their own organizations to address some or all of the components listed. Of course if you are attending the onrec Expo 2010 in Chicago in September – you can walk around and talk to the exhibitors, face to face! 

At the end of the day, organizations whose combined screening solution set includes the components detailed above, are able to see positive results in short order, including a dramatic reduction in time-to-hire and cost-to-hire.  The end-employer should also experience a substantial reduction in absenteeism, turnover and employee theft – and in the long run, a significantly higher performing workforce. 

This information is not intended to constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon in lieu of consultation with your organization’s appropriate legal advisors.  

Jill Gengler
Vice President
AccuSearch, Inc.
602-759-8626
jgengler@accusearch.biz

Related posts:

1. Identifying Transferable Skills
2. Face It Recruiters…Interviews Suck
3. Partnership for myStaffingPro and Bamboo HR

“Women and the Economy 2010: 25 Years of Progress But Challenges Remain,” a new report by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC), looks at how women’s economic conditions have improved over the past 25 years, and the findings are encouraging. Women now comprise nearly half of the labor force, the reveals the report, which goes on to note that slightly more of them than men now graduate from four-year high schools.

Among the highlights of women’s economic progress and advancement in the work world are the following:

• In 2009, 59.2 percent of women were in the labor force, up from 53.6 percent in 1984.
• In 2009, women made up 49.8 percent of the workforce, up from 44 percent in 1984
• In 2009, 87 percent of women had at least four years of high school education, compared to 73 percent in 1984. By contrast, in 2009, 86 percent of men had at least four years of high school education, compared to 74 percent in 1984.
• In 2008, women made up 45 percent of all union members, an increase from 34 percent in 1984.
• In 1983, wives’ incomes comprised just 29 percent of total family income. By 2008, wives’ incomes comprised 36 percent of family income.
• Between 1983 and 2008, married couples with a working wife experienced average annual income growth of 1.12 percent, while married couples with a stay-at-home wife saw their average annual incomes decline by 0.22 percent per year.

Related posts:

1. Recruiting Women
2. Best Practices in Recruiting and Retaining Women: Takeaways from the 2010 Catalyst Awards Conference
3. Full U.S. Job Recovery Could Be Long-Term

Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

There is no question about it, interviews suck – and it doesn’t matter if you are the recruiter, the recruitee, or someone else who’s been sucked into the process.

There are three simple reasons.

First, interviews are very much like blind dates. Both sides get a lot of hype upfront, and most of it is inaccurate or misleading. Think back to the last time you bought-into: “…and he’s so good to his mother” or “…but she has a wonderful personality.” Is that any different from “…he’s an undervalued property” or “…you’ll really grow with this company”? The bottom line is interviews are a form of assessment, and no matter how structured or ‘fair’ you think you are being, they are neither standardized nor objective. Even if you are using ‘behavioral interviewing’ techniques, the information you retain about each candidate will still have been filtered through your personal frame of reference and unconscious biases. And just like the date who seemed like a perfect ‘fit’ – until their quirks, or their temper, or some other ‘undocumented features’ began to show up – there are people who have become experts at getting hired by NOT being themselves during the interview process. (Did you know there are dating coaches and interview coaches which drill people in how to ‘get lucky’?)

Second, for various reasons, the scales tend to tilt in favor of people who are least likely to be great team players. Poorly defined job scope? Insufficient resources? Unrealistic performance expectations? A great team player will raise relevant issues for discussion. A bad team player will tell you just what you want to hear. To make matters worse, all parties to the interview process have the same desired outcome, which no one will openly admit: they just want to get it over with!

• For HR or a staff recruiter, the harder the hiring manager is to deal with, the stronger this desire becomes.
• For an external recruiter, the desire to close and move on is variable: retained search, “No problem”; contingency, “Excellent choice! When will my check be mailed?”
• The interviewer(s) will push for rapid progress to the ‘right’ decision, despite the fact that the same process has proven faulty in the past.
• And lastly, the candidates (depending on their employment status, how shaky they think their present situation is, and any number of other factors) want a job, a great job, the perfect job, or at least one they can survive at until they land somewhere else. All this pressure favors candidates who are easy to ‘fall in love with’ instead of the people who are the most capable of adding value to the team.

Third, the very best person for the job rarely gets picked. Why? Let’s go back to dating for a moment. Did you know that the surest way to hook up with the wrong person is to look for someone who matches your personal ‘want list’? (This is a fact based on research, not folklore.) Think about it: can a list of experiences, skills, and physical attributes predict the quality of interpersonal behavior? Certainly not! In order to get a positive I.D. on a ‘good team-player’, you need to know something about how the person will behave when working with others to overcome obstacles and achieve common goals. Unfortunately, that’s not what we get from interviewing.

First there are the interminable screenings to match candidates to a ‘job req’, i.e., the ‘want list’. And since screening is rarely done by the person doing the hiring, persons with slightly different – yet truly unique and excellent – qualifications usually get kicked to the curb. The longer and more complex the interview process, and the more people involved, the more likely the process will produce a lowest-common-denominator selection. Example: we know of a senior level executive who worked for well over a year to convince a competitor’s top salesman to ‘jump ship’, only to lose this guaranteed star player in an off-target and humiliating (for the candidate) intra-departmental ‘stress interview’. Bottom line: interview survivors may be the ones who best tolerate non-productivity, who thrive on petty corporate politics, and/or who blow the biggest smokescreen.

As the saying goes, “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.” If your hiring manager wants productive teams, you need to be able to identify the best team players. Now there’s a way to do that BEFORE you make big investments in a questionable interview process and risk a long-term commitment to the wrong person.  

Some aspects of interviewing may always suck, but the outcomes will be a lot better if you limit it to the candidates who really know how to ‘team’.

Disclosure: This article was written by the CEO of the company which developed Role-Based Assessment (RBA), a completely new way to predict how a person will behave when working in teams. RBA measures components of human behavior–Coherence, Role, and Teaming Characteristics–which have not been directly reportable through any other form of testing. This enables RBA technology to provide a positive I.D. on top quality team-players, as well as key information that supports employee development and guides the creation of a strong, healthy human infrastructure.

For more information, call 1-215-825-2500, or visit www.thegabrielinstitute.com.

Related posts:

1. Identifying Transferable Skills
2. Recruiters: One Ugly Question That Can Save your Life
3. Recruiters Give Job Seekers Guidance and Glimmer of Hope

Paula Santonocito, Business Journalist, Onrec.com

Although there’s a lot of talk about transferable skills, identifying and articulating skills that are transferable beyond a position or industry can be challenging.

Determining Fit

Ideally, determining how past experience and acquired skills translate to a new opportunity should initially be the job seeker’s responsibility.

Under the best circumstances, an employer or recruiter posts a job opening that includes a detailed description of the position. The job seeker reads the posting and figures out if his or her background matches the requirements. If there is a fit, the person submits a carefully prepared resume that contains keywords that align with the job description.

Unfortunately, job seekers don’t always pay attention to whether their skills are applicable. This is especially true in the current employment environment. “We see a lot of job seekers who say this is a job I’m going for. A lot of job seekers get locked into the job description,” says Randall Hansen, Ph.D., president of Quintessential Careers, an online employment resource founded in 1996.

Some of these job seekers may be savvy enough to use keywords, which allow their resumes to come to the top of the electronic pile. Other job seekers, however, fire off documents that do not match. These resumes only serve to contribute to the number of applicants for a given position, creating additional work for employers and recruiters and frustrating the job seekers who then lament about the black hole of the job search process.

Identifying Skills

Addressing the issue from the job seeker side requires educating the masses. Quintessential Careers provides information about transferable skills at its website in order to help job seekers identify exactly what skills they have and how these skills relate to the job search.

Under the heading, “Transferable Skills Sets for Job-Seekers,” Quintessential Careers indicates that job skills can be broken down into five basic categories: Communication; Research and Planning; Human Relations; Organization, Management and Leadership; and Work Survival.

Under the Communication heading, job seekers will find skills like speaking effectively; writing concisely; listening attentively; and expressing ideas, and others.

The Research and Planning category includes forecasting, predicting; creating ideas; identifying problems; and imagining alternatives, and other skills.

Human Relations includes developing rapport; being sensitive; listening; conveying feelings; providing support for others; motivating, and other skills.

Under Organization, Management and Leadership, job seekers will find skills such as initiating new ideas; handling details; coordinating tasks; managing groups; and delegating responsibility, and others.

Finally, Work Survival includes implementing decisions; cooperating; enforcing policies; being punctual; managing time, and other skills.

All are common words and phrases that, when aligned with job requirements, can pique employer interest.

Defining Skills

Nevertheless, a resume has its limitations. Words on paper, electronic or otherwise, are only words on paper. How those words relate to activities and accomplishments determine whether skills are transferable.

Once an employer has identified a highly viable candidate and invites the person to interview, Hansen recommends probing with the intent of identifying depth of skills. “Ask some pertinent questions to expand upon what they did in the past job that’s not on the resume,” he says.

Hansen advises breaking down the skills into actions. Employers and recruiters looking for communication, teamwork, and other skills have to ask behavioral type questions in order to do this, he says. To probe for teamwork skills, for example, ask the candidate to provide an example where s/he worked as a member of a team. “It forces the person to tell a story,” Hansen says.

He also cites the importance of quantifying accomplishments. The term “management experience,” for example, is vague. “Managed a staff of 50 as opposed to managing a staff of two is very different,” Hansen says.

Similarly, a candidate’s proclaimed accomplishment doesn’t always provide enough information about related skills. Even managing a staff of 50 doesn’t necessarily say anything about management ability. You need to have the story behind it, Hansen says, which you can get to by asking questions like, how did you motivate people.

Employer’s Responsibility

The interview is an ideal time to probe for transferable skills. However, Hansen finds employers and recruiters miss an earlier opportunity to find candidates with skills that fit.

“Not all employers give great job descriptions,” he says, noting the most common mistake is that the descriptions are too brief.

“I think the best job postings are the ones that are explicit,” Hansen says. When skills are detailed, a job seeker in theory knows how to tailor a resume, he says, which creates a win-win situation.

Some employers take the process beyond detailed job descriptions in an effort to match skills. Hansen gives the example of consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, which was one of the first companies to use its corporate careers site to basically say, here’s how you get hired at our organization. Procter & Gamble continues to offer step-by-step guidelines at its careers site.

Hansen suggests other companies adopt the approach to increase the likelihood of finding candidates who fit. Making sure people are doing their due diligence also helps to thin out the number of qualified candidates, he says.

Changing Industries

Even so, transferable skills are generally easiest to articulate and recognize within an industry. When job seekers wish to change industries, they have to prove they have skills applicable to a new environment. “That’s the hardest thing for job seekers,” Hansen says.

Yet he also points out this is the power of transferable skills. Teamwork, good writing skills, and organizational skills are all transferable.

Be that as it may, Hansen indicates there is a tendency on the part of employers to look at candidates within an industry, even when skills don’t completely match. Employers find it easier to hire someone in the field, someone who appears to be able to hit the ground running.

This industry-specific mindset can lead to missed opportunity. A candidate from another industry, who has the skills, can bring an outside perspective, and new perspective can make a difference, Hansen says.

Interestingly, transferable skills are what recruiters and hiring managers consider at the senior executive level. A CEO of a retail company may have no retail experience; but since his skill set includes extensive turnaround and leadership experience, he is recognized as a fit for the job.

Effective Recruiting

A major difference is that the senior executive is able to effectively articulate his transferable skills. Meanwhile, identifying transferable skills for entry- and mid-level candidates requires additional effort on the part employers.

Nevertheless, creating detailed job descriptions and asking behavioral-based interview questions in order to identify transferable skills can prove worthwhile.

“I would think employers would really want to do this,” says Hansen. “It should give them a better pool of applicants.”

Related posts:

1. Recruiters Give Job Seekers Guidance and Glimmer of Hope
2. Free Online Job Posting Worldwide
3. Youth and Unemployment

More than 48 percent of industries experienced a quarterly percentage gain in online jobs posted, according to Beyond.com, Inc.’s Second Quarter 2010 Career Trend Analysis Report, released earlier this week. This reconciles with findings fromMonster Employment Index, which has shown a year-over-year increase in online job postings for the past six months. More than 73 percent of employers were looking for full-time employees, according to Beyond’s findings, an increase of 12 percent from the previous quarter. Healthcare and Medical represented the largest percentage gain in overall jobs posted (5.57 percent), followed by 2.24 percent for Sales and Sales Management. 

Juxtapose Beyond’s data with results from TalentDrive’s Job Market Perceptions survey, which uncover a widening gap between current employers’ expectations and job seekers’ actual skill sets. Assessing their personal skill set and attitude toward the current job market, 71 percent of the 79,000 job seekers surveyed (86 percent considered to be actively seeking employment) were pessimistic about their career search, feeling they possessed the required skill set but were not getting hired. Moreover, 37 percent were extremely frustrated, with no hope for improvement in sight. Just over one-third (34 percent) were unhappy with the environment, but starting to see signs of improvement.

As a counterpoint to these findings, 42 percent of employers indicated that the recession had not only increased the quantity of candidates, but in fact they are finding more qualified candidates than in years past. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of job seekers surveyed have had 5 or more interviews per month since beginning their job search, and 75 percent of these job seekers have not received a single job offer.

The seemingly inexplicable circumstances are attributable to employers’ need for candidates with specialized skill sets, whereas the majority of job seekers describe themselves as possessing broad skill sets.

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2. Employers Remain Cautious on Finance Hiring
3. Outplacement Opportunities with New Job Search Strategy

Adam Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Innovate CV

Adam started this conversation a few weeks ago and this is what he took from it after discussions with other recruiters:

True story, Pete is a dear friend of mine and after eight years in recruitment he’s had enough.

He’s had enough of the hours.

He’s had enough of the chasing.

He’s had enough of the competition.

So Pete is becoming an author and he’s not writing about recruitment, CVs, or interview techniques, he’s writing a book about travelling – Vietnam, to be precise.

“Pete,” I stutter, still trying to making sense of it all. “You’re a top recruiter…everyone, especially your clients, think the world of you…and you’ve chalked up more achievements and awards than anyone at your firm!”

“Well,” he begins as he smooths his mocha’s cream with the bottom of his spoon, his expression completely dull – frightfully empty. “I didn’t really ever…like recruiting. And to tell you the truth…I don’t really know why I went into the business in the first place.”

Recruiting Trends readers, I can tell exactly you why our friend Pete spent eight precious years in recruiting. His father happens to be one of our industry icons from the 80’s. It doesn’t take a Freud to work out what went on here.

Several days later, as part of filming our Innovate CV TV career advice interviews, we spoke to marketing and advertising extraordinaire, David Roth (CEO of The Store, one of WPP’s agencies), and asked David what he thought the first and foremost piece of advice he would offer those thinking about a career in marketing.

He didn’t even blink.“Ask yourself: do you really want to get into marketing?”

Now David’s answer, I’ll admit, didn’t initially strike me as…well, enlightening. But it only took a moment, given the context of my recent conversation with Pete, to appreciate this pearl of wisdom.

Until now, Pete had been fuelled by the thrill of achievement and success. But honour and glory (and all the glittery things that go with it) can generally carry a person only so long – and after eight years, Pete had reached a point where he didn’t know why he was getting out of bed in the morning.

I have been blessed to have met some remarkable personalities in our industry, including a 29 year veteran who controls a global network of agencies. His face was afire with enthusiasm as he once roared: “Do you realize how we change people’s lives…their families? How we change the companies that we send our clients to? Do you understand what we do as an industry has a material effect on the local and global economy! We’re transforming the world!”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. However; I’d be weary to dismiss the thoughts of a man of this stature and experience. He’s thrived for 29 years in this industry because he not only believes this outlook; he truly lives by it, as his radiance would testify.

Is everyone capable of approaching this attitude and does it matter?

Another industry icon pointed out to me that 90% of recruiters are simply plain-old good recruiters; people who are moderately capable and broadly satisfied. And that’s just fine, he argues. Do we have a right to demand recruiters be “passionate” about their industry?

Yes!  There is a tremendous amount if inspiration to be drawn from the recruiting concept. It’s our duty to find it and acquire it for ourselves. yes, for some it may come more naturally, while for others it may take more work – but objectively speaking, it’s there. And with this realization, we’ll renew our energy and spark, to everyone’s benefit – first and foremost ourselves.

But what if someone simply can’t connect ‘enthusiasm’ with ‘recruiting’? Recruiting work pays the bills, and that’s what counts.

Granted, there are some people who don’t need to be particularly excited about what they do for 8+ hours each and every day and muster up the inner-strength to keep soldiering on – but it takes a great degree of self-awareness to know if one fits into this arguably unhealthy category.

But for the rest of us, there’s just too much work and stress in recruitment. Without a wholehearted appreciation for the human aspect of what we do, one will find it difficult (sooner or later) to survive, let alone thrive.

Pete knew where he stood. But all those years ago if only he asked himself,“…do you really want to get into recruitment?”

Adam Lewis is Innovate CV’s Chief Operating Officer. Innovate CV is an interactive new-generation CV that makes creating, editing, distributing and tracking a CV a simple and straightforward process – and can provide tailored solutions for your recruitment agency.

Related posts:

1. Adam Lewis – Bio
2. Recruiters Give Job Seekers Guidance and Glimmer of Hope
3. Identifying Transferable Skills